Tag: common

The autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), including autism and its milder cousin Asperger syndrome, affect about 1 in 150 American children. There’s a lot of evidence that these conditions have a strong genetic basis. For example, identical twins who share the same DNA are much more likely to both develop similar autistic disorders than non-identical twins, who only share half their DNA.

But the hunt for mutations that predispose people to autism has been long and fraught. By looking at families with a history of ASDs, geneticists have catalogued hundreds of genetic variants that are linked to the conditions, each differing from the standard sequence by a single ‘letter’. But all of these are rare. Until now, no one has discovered a variant that affects the risk of autism and is common in the general population. And with autistic people being so different from one another, finding such mutations seemed increasingly unlikely. Some studies have come tantalisingly close, narrowing down the search to specific parts of certain chromosomes, but they’ve all stopped short of actually pinning down individual variants.

This week, American scientists from over a dozen institutes have overcome this final hurdle. By looking all over the genomes of over 10,000 people, the team narrowed their search further and further until they found not one but six common genetic variants tied to ASDs. This sextet probably affects the activity of genes that connect nerve cells together in the developing human brain.